Help:Editing

Overall aim

Newgon's aim is to provide concise and easy-to-deploy material for activists roughly aligned to our ethos.

In other words, we are seeking to compile only the useful and accessible information, making it easy to retrieve and re-use in online guerilla activism/the real world. We will avoid excessive self-reference and jargon, aiming to make ourselves accessible to both the public and sympathetic individuals who wish to act as public educators.

Ask yourself - "on a scale of 1-5", what is the risk of censorship for this information? Censorship can be erasure or distortion on a resource such as Wikipedia. If it's a 4 or 5, let's write a nice, clean article about it. If it's 1 or 2, let's write a stub if it's important to us, and link to Wikipedia, etc. Also ask yourself - on a scale of 1-5 what is the strategic alignment of a person or organization with our ethos? 1s and 5s are important topics, as are many 2s and 4s. Let's get ROC and SA scores uploaded to the articles in a pretty template!

What does NewgonWiki do?

We host lots of things. Here are some examples of ongoing work:

Project topics such as - Debate, Research, Testimony, Legal Information (much of this doubles as encyclopedic - just look at the articles/categories to see how), Important texts (archives) and materials used to promote this site.

Encyclopedic topics such as Personal and Organization Profiles, Terminology, Important texts (about) and much more.

You are also free, to provide the following:

Relevant book reviews - within a categorize encyclopedic/stub-encyclopedic article on the topic (please).

Personal experimental/essay content. Essay/Experimental/Creative writing are other potential uses of NewgonWiki, and are openly encouraged. It won't get you a link on the front page, but all content should be added to Category:Essays so it can be read by those casting around for new ideas.

How does NewgonWiki organize this material?

All public material barring personal essay and user-page content is classified as Encyclopedia and/or Project - oriented. Some project material such as Research and Debate Guide can be accessed via the navigation panel/homepage, but also enters a limited number of Encyclopedia categories. Pure Encyclopedia material (e.g. People, Organizations, Historical Events) is put into multiple encyclopedia categories as demanded by Help:Categories. All public material barring user-page content is categorized in some way, even if it is an essay in a non-encyclopedia author category as above.

For help categorizing material (vital for new encyclopedia content), see Help:Categories.

Working standards

Do not feel afraid to ask about working standards on forums or the noticeboard. Many of the accepted standards are cultural and not explained here.

• NewgonWiki avoids unnecessary capitalization in titles and subsections. For example, titles may read "National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" for the NSPCC, and "List of organisations supporting child advocacy" for a list article. Some of our material still uses unnecessary capitalization.

• Over time, we should Americanize out spellings. This is not a major priority, and will obviously require category moves if and when.

• Project page formats are decided on a per-project basis, and can be observed in the uniformity of project content wikicode concerned. Use the preview to see what it looks like. We tend to go for the more visually appealing styles, and maintain consistent style throughout a project.

• Encyclopedia article formats/section orders/referencing are almost identical* to Wikipedia's, but with extra checks in place to avoid the ugliness associated with some Wikipedia articles. For a decent flagship article, see Jack McClellan, and click "edit" (or "view source" if you have no account) to see the wikitext that codes for an aesthetic text-wrapped TOC and various image positions. *Please don't go mad on copying the auto-formatted Wikipedia referencing schema, until we have a decent visual emulator installed and fully adopted by all of our editors. It creates masses of Wikicode. Updates coming on this.

• Order of content, if it's not obvious: Introductory sections (and if required, the disclaimers or hatnotes before them) should have no heading, and should mention the subject of the article in bold, somewhere near the start of the passage. Intros should try to avoid using references, and should, in the case of larger articles, simply sum up the topic and what the rest of the article elaborates. The order of the following, headed sections may then progress roughly in the following fashion: 1. Any historical information 2. Any organisational, personal, conceptual features. The meat of the article. 3. Any scrutiny, praise or criticism. 4. Any commentaries, quoted for convenience. 5. Any "see also" list. 6. Any references (see below) 7. Any internal links list, and then external links list if either is required. 8. List of categories (trivial, as categories always migrate to the end, but best kept in one place).

• Basic aesthetic/format controls: Do not let Tables of Contents act as pillars for wasteful and ugly white space at the head of articles - we're not Wikipedia. For example, to remove a ToC in a short or medium size article, insert __NOTOC__ at the start of an article. To wrap text around a left-floating ToC in a big article, for example, insert <div style="margin-right: 25px; float: left;">__TOC__</div>. IMAGE FUNCTIONALITY CURRENTLY PENDING UPDATE - MAY NOT WORK Illustrate articles by uploading and then formatting images left or right with captions, for example, inserting [[Image:Imagename.fileextension|thumb|Caption for image]], replacing "thumb" with "frame" for the fullsize image. Reference lists are made easy by wrapping the material (URLs, Book refs, etc) in ref tags, i.e. <ref>Full book ref, or link</ref>. Then place a references list at the end of the article, or for whatever reason if you need one before the end, just insert: {{reflist}} where relevant. Other useful formatting codes include :text goes here to indent a paragraph, and *text goes here to bullet a paragraph.

Remember to make use of the formatting buttons above the edit window, hovering to reveal each button's function (2021: we'll soon get a decent emulator, and editor, even the standard one is much better nowadays)

Where to start

Here are some user-generated projects and "special pages" for aiding the development of the Wiki:

Noticeboard

In-house discussion about the Wiki.

Articles in progress

A list of incomplete articles that cannot yet be categorised (added to the encyclopedia).

Mirror Project

Using other wikis to duplicate content and add to ours (with some cautions).

Wanted pages

Wanted pages is a list of articles proposed by implied wikilinkage, but not yet created on the Wiki. Some of them are not needed - please remove the wikilinks from the articles.

Special pages

Browse this index for novel stuff that will help build the wiki.

To-do list

Find something on our to-do list.

Resources

These may be used to supplement new content and expand reading.

Research Resources

Literature reviews.

Linkblog

For listing links of interest to Newgon.com editors.